With a slow and distinct enunciation, tinged with a slight American accent, which gives piquancy to his delivery, he pours forth a flood of most graphic word painting.

A woman could do up her hair twice while he pronounced the word Mississippi. He lingers over it, plays with it, handles it as a young mother does her first baby.

He talks slowly and extracts each of his vowels with a corkscrew twist that would make even the announcement of a funeral sound like a joke.

A pause. A longer pause than usual. An abominably protracted pause. A pause hovering on the abyss of irretrievable silence.

This is a description of Mark Twain speaking, from a book of interviews which will be published about him next month. Taken from the September issue of Harper’s.

I didn’t want to make this my second post, but here it is, I couldn’t resist. More specifically, reading it wiped what I was going to type from my memory, but that’s a fault of my own. I really shouldn’t have put it here, I’m hesitant to type anything now, nothing compares with it, and it does sort of conflict with my master plan. What I explained to be my master plan in the introduction, at least. But oh well, and god, what a strange sort of person I am.